Humans Are Still Evolving, Analysis Finds

Data collected as part of a 60-year study suggests that humans are likely to evolve at roughly the same rates as other living things. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 20, 2009) — Although advances in medical care have improved standards of living over time, humans aren't entirely sheltered from the forces of natural selection, a new study shows.

"There is this idea that because medicine has been so good at reducing mortality rates, that means that natural selection is no longer operating in humans," said Stephen Stearns of Yale University.

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First-Time Internet Use Alters Activity In Older Brains

Images show brain scans of those with minimal prior Internet experience compared to those with a lot of web experience. Note during the second brain scans, which is after Internet training, both Naives and Savvies have similar brain patterns. Credit: UCLA

From Live Science:

Adults with little internet experience show changes in their brain activity after just one week online, a new study finds.

The results suggest Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.

As the brain ages, a number of structural and functional changes occur, including atrophy, or decay, reductions in cell activity and increases in complex things like deposits of amyloid plaques and tau tangles, which can impact cognitive function.

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Darwin's Contribution To Geology Overlooked

Photo: A copy made by John Collier in 1883 of his 1881 portrait of Charles Darwin. Darwin was a geologist too, say experts. Credit: Wikimedia

From Cosmos:

PORTLAND, OREGON: Darwin was more than a biologist; he was first, and foremost, a geologist, say researchers who presented talks at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting.

Darwin is known mostly for his revolutionary work on understanding the process of evolution and natural selection. But Edward Evenson, a glacial geologist who gave a presentation at the meeting in Portland today, said: "I'm here to try to change that perception."

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Better To Live In Country With Rights-Possessing Robots?

Photo: Female Cylons from Battlestar Galactica

From The Future Pundit:

Robin Hanson doesn't want to live in a country where robots are held back from full sentience and autonomy.

On Tuesday I asked my law & econ undergrads what sort of future robots (AIs computers etc.) they would want, if they could have any sort they wanted. Most seemed to want weak vulnerable robots that would stay lower in status, e.g., short, stupid, short-lived, easily killed, and without independent values. When I asked “what if I chose to become a robot?”, they said I should lose all human privileges, and be treated like the other robots. I winced; seems anti-robot feelings are even stronger than anti-immigrant feelings, which bodes for a stormy robot transition.

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High-Stakes Test Looms for Space Shuttle Successor

NASA officials say they plan to install two dampening systems to control vibrations in the Ares I rocket (Illustration: NASA/MSFC)

From New Scientist:

Talk about pressure. As the troubled successor to NASA's space shuttle powers up for its first flight test, a White House panel is weighing up whether to cancel the project.

The Ares I rocket is designed to carry a crew capsule called Orion to Earth orbit, where it could dock with the International Space Station or form part of a mission to the moon. But it has been plagued with budget problems and technical hitches.

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New Dinosaur Extinction Theory Causes Debate

An artist rendering of a space rock streaking toward Earth. Most experts think an impact off the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago was the primary cause of the dinosaur demise. Others think volcanism and climate change may have played a role. A new and controversial idea suggests there was another, larger impact in India that was responsible. Stockxpert

From MSNBC:

The extinction of the dinosaurs has often been traced to a giant space rock impact on the Earth 65 million years ago. But now a scientist is saying experts have blamed the wrong impact. The new thinking was met with sharp criticism from other researchers, however.

Paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University says a giant basin in India called Shiva could also be an impact crater from the time of the dinosaurs' demise, and the crash that created it may have been the cause of the mass extinction scientists call the KT (Cretaceous–Tertiary) event, which killed off more than half the Earth's species along with the dinos. This argument runs counter to the widely-held wisdom that the Chicxulub impact on the Yucatan Peninsula off Mexico was behind the cataclysm.

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What Is The Real Cost Of Power Production?

POLLUTION COSTS: The hidden costs of power production include the health effects of air pollution and alternative fuels are no panacea. Corn ethanol has similar or even slightly higher negative impacts than gasoline. © iStockphoto.com / Mayumi Terao

From Scientific American:

Market prices don't reflect hundreds of billions of dollars in hidden costs of energy production to human health and the environment.

Market prices don't reflect hundreds of billions of dollars in hidden costs of energy production to human health and the environment, a National Research Council panel said in a report released today.

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Child-Care Centers And Parents Brace For Flu Season

Najlah Feanny / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

Over the years, day-care and child-care centers have become a security blanket for millions of working parents who need their children looked after during the day. But as an H1N1 epidemic draws closer, these centers look less like protective bastions and more like potential H1N1 incubators.

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2012 Doomsday Not Likely, Mayans Insist

From Discovery:

Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.

Or is it?

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."

It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood's "2012" opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.

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In Search Of That Word On The Tip Of Your Tongue

Jennie Pyers signs with a young deaf boy in Nicaragua. Pyers studied bilingual sign language speakers to solve the "tip of the tongue" question. Wellesley College

From USA Today:

On the tip of your tongue, that word you can't dig out. Why not?

The tip of your tongue may be the wrong place to look, psychologists suggest. They find that hearing, sign-language speakers may hold the keys to finding where those words are hiding.

"You know the word, you just can't get it out," says Jennie Pyers of Wellesley (Mass.) College. "Well, it turns out sign-language speakers have the same problem," she says. Only they are called "tip-of-the-finger" glitches, rather than "tip-of the tongue" by psychologists.

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How The Moon Produces Its Own Water

Chandrayaan-1 SARA measurements of hydrogen flux recorded on the Moon on 6 February 2009. (Credit: Elsevier 2009 (Wieser et al.), ESA-ISRO SARA data)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 19, 2009) — The Moon is a big sponge that absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These particles interact with the oxygen present in some dust grains on the lunar surface, producing water. This discovery, made by the ESA-ISRO instrument SARA onboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, confirms how water is likely being created on the lunar surface.

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Why Have Sex? To Fend Off Parasites

Indiana University student Kayla King dissects snails under the microscope.
Credit: Kayla King, Indiana University

From Live Science:

Since Darwin’s time, biologists have tried to understand the advantages of sexual reproduction.
This is not trivial because there are clear disadvantages to sex.

Unlike sexual organisms, asexuals do not need a partner to reproduce, can reproduce clonally, and can produce twice as many female offspring. If there were no advantages to sex, and both sexual and asexual individuals were competing for resources, the asexuals would take over in only a few generations.

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Could Early Retirement Kill You?

From The Telegraph:

Full retirement after a life of work could actually kill you, claims new research.

A new study shows that people who give up work completely are less healthy than those who carry on in a part time job.

It found they experience fewer serious diseases and are able to function better day-to-day than those who stop working altogether.

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Are You Ready For The Third Dimension?

Photo: Coming to a home near you: Sky and Channel 4 are set to bring 3D technology into the living room

From The Daily Mail:

Cameras, laptops, computer games, even Channel 4 - the 3D experience is about to leap off the big screen and into your living room...

This Is It, the movie that documents Michael Jackson's final rehearsals for his never-to-be O2 residency, includes 3D movie sequences originally intended to be used in his comeback shows.

It's part of a new generation of 3D movies designed to tempt recession-hit movie-lovers back into the cinema - and it follows this year's string of 3D successes, including Coraline, Monsters vs Aliens and Bolt.

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Crystals Hold Super Computer Key

From The BBC:

Tiny crystals could hold the key to creating computers with massive storage capacity, scientists believe.

The crystals could be used as storage devices for desktop computers capable of holding 100-times more data than current systems.

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have been using low-energy lasers to make salt crystals in gel.

The development could allow users to store a terabyte of data in a space the size of a sugar cube within a decade.

This would be enough to hold the equivalent of 250,000 photographs or a million books.

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Energy Out Of The Blue: Generating Electric Power From The Clash Of River And Sea Water

ELECTRIC BLUE: New projects aim to generate energy by harnessing the salinity-balancing effects where freshwater rivers flow into salty seas. © NASA/ROBERT SIMMON

From Scientific American:

Two pilot projects are testing the potential of "salt power," a renewable energy that relies on the differing salinities at river mouths to make watts.

In the hunt for alternatives to polluting and climate-warming fossil fuels, attention has turned to where rivers meet the sea. Here, freshwater and saltwater naturally settle their salinity difference, a phenomenon that two pioneering projects in Europe will try to harness to generate clean energy.

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When Is A Species Endangered? Revising The Numbers

An endangered Sumatran tiger wades through a stream
Tom Brakefield / Getty

From Time Magazine:

The planet is in the middle of an extinction crisis, the sixth great wave in its history. But unlike major extinction events of the past — like the Permian-Triassic event 250 million years ago, in which 70% of all terrestrial species were wiped out, probably because of an asteroid impact or a similar natural disaster — this time human beings are the cause. Hard numbers are difficult to find, but many scientists believe Earth's species are going extinct at a rate that is up to 1,000 times higher than before human beings came on the scene.

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Barking Dogs Explained

Barking -- With Reason. Animal welfare researchers have uncovered why
city-living domestic dogs may be prone to nuisance barking. iStockPhoto

From Discovery:

Animal welfare researchers have uncovered why city-living domestic dogs may be prone to nuisance barking.

In this month's issue of Australian Veterinary Journal, a team from the University of Queensland's Center for Animal Welfare and Ethics report a case-control survey of 150 dog owners including 72 dogs whose owners had sought treatment for nuisance barking.

Barking can be classified as being a nuisance when it causes distress or interruption to the life of the dogs' owners or neighbors.

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In Search Of What Everyone's Clicking

Photo: Real-time search: Wowd indexes pages visited by its users and ranks them based on either their popularity or their freshness. Credit: Wowd

From Technology Review:

A real-time search engine bases its results on users' browsing habits.

Later this week, a new "real-time" and "social" search engine called Wowd will open a beta version of its service to the public. The company says that its search results include only pages that have actually been visited by its users, and that its ranking algorithms offer information based on its freshness and popularity.

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Quantcast Quantum Computers Could Tackle Enormous Equations

From U.S. News And World Report:

Trillions of variables may prove no match for envisioned systems.

A new algorithm may give quantum computers a new, practical job: quickly solving monster linear equations. Such problems are at the heart of complex processes such as image and video processing, genetic analyses and even Internet traffic control. The new work, published October 7 in Physical Review Letters, may dramatically expand the range of potential uses for quantum computers.

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